Last I checked, Lotus did themselves by not innovating, and betting on the wrong horse (OS/2) then not doing well on a pivot to Windows.

Meanwhile Excel was gaining features and winning users with them even before Windows was in play.

> betting on the wrong horse (OS/2)

Ahhhh, your hindsight is well developed. I would be interested to know the background on the reasons why Lotus made that bet. We can't know the counterfactual, but Lotus delivering on a platform owned by their deadly competitor Microsoft would seem to me to be a clearly worrysome idea to Lotus at the time. Turned out it was an existentially bad idea. Did Lotus fear Microsoft? "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" is a myth[1] for a reason. We can just imagine a narritive of a different timeline where Lotus delivered on Windows but did some things differently to beat Excel. I agree, Lotus made other mistakes and Microsoft made some great decisions, but the point remains.

We can also suspect that AMD have a similar choice now where they are forked. Depending on Nvidea/CUDA may be a similar choice for AMD - fail if they do and fail if they don't.

[1] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...

I've seen rumours from self-claimed ex-Lotus employees that IBM made a deal with Lotus to prioritise OS/2

This is a key point. Before windows we had all the dos players - WordPerfect was king. Microsoft was more focused on the Mac. I’ve always assumed that Microsoft understood that a GUI was coming and trained a generation of developers on the main gui of the day. Once windows came out the dos focused apps could not adapt in time